Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
by ablett29
Summary: What's black and white and read all over?


Title: Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before  
Pairing: Implied Rose/Ten  
Rating: PG  
Summary: What's black and white and read all over?  
Disclaimer: Not mine.

_What's black and white and read all over?_

It's an old joke, a tired one; one Rose remembers telling she was a kid. She'd told it to the Doctor once, tongue between her teeth as she grinned, teasing, watching him try to figure it out. He'd wrinkled his nose when she told him the answer, protesting that newspapers _weren't_ read all over, just the sports and the comics and occasionally the front page, and ended up talking about human jokes being terrible anyway. (There were no newspapers on the TARDIS, but it was a long time since Rose had wanted her old ritual of the crossword anyway.)

She thinks of it now, living here on this new, alternate world as the days pass, one by one in that old ordinary way they used to before she met the Doctor and everything changed (and it's funny, now, to think that back then, she never used to mind). _It's black and white and read all over. _Except that when she was a kid she'd always thought the word was _red_ because, well, it was logical, it fit in and anyway she liked the colour. And besides, if you took away the red, only the black and white were left, and they had a meaning all of their own. _It's not that black and white, Rose,_ Jackie used to say to her when she was a kid and she'd ask why Jackie never married the men she occasionally brought home. _It's just not that black and white_. Rose has learnt, since, that it's never just black and white. Her own life, she supposes, is black and white and all those millions of shades of grey that mix things up, confuse them, and somehow make it difficult to move on.

But she sometimes wonders what her life would be like if it _was_ that black and white, if it really _was_ just that simple. The colours would be represented by worlds, she decides, not people or events because they're too specific and black and white are broad by their very nature, colours without being colours.

Her world, her home world, Rose decides, would be the white. Not that she's biased towards it as a world with a Doctor as opposed to a world without one, but her own world seems somehow purer than this one she now lives on, which so clearly represents the black. After all, this one is the world from which the Cybermen originated. This is the world where Prime Minister Harriet Jones orders murder. And this is the one in which Rose works for a Torchwood that kills without mercy.

It is not the one where Rose traveled with a compassionate man (alien) who saved when he could, and worried when he couldn't. It is Rose's world in which they discovered pigs in spaceships and did all they could to help them. And, though it seems silly, it is her own world that Rose imagines being the light at the end of the tunnel when she dies.

Black and white, she thinks, good and bad. The Doctor, quite obviously good in a way that no one else could ever be, the knight in shining white armour; Rose? _I am the Bad Wolf… _Rose is the darkness, the fairytale witch. She is the black, the Doctor the white; good and evil, purity and despair…

And the void is red, full of cries and pain and blood and Rose imagines the voices of the Daleks amongst it all and closes her eyes. It's all in her head, she knows, she has no concept of what is really there but in her mind there's fire and blood and suffering and in the night she dreams that she is a part of it.

And somehow the three blur into one, the lines shifting, combining until she can no longer separate the one from the other. Rose, Jackie and Mickey are proof of this, bringing with them the essence of their white planet into this black one. Rose, too, was influenced long ago by the blend, gaining some of the Doctor's light, as they held hands and ran from aliens, as she passed the Time Vortex from her body to his, as she sat quietly with him, filled to the brim with his goodness and his light, which helped to keep away some of her own darkness. And the void bleeds into everything, invading Rose's every thought and dream, claiming her without ever taking her. And she wonders if that isn't what the void _is_, just a thought, just a shadow, just a hint of something that could drive you mad.

_What's black and white and red all over? _

That's right, Rose decides. That sums it up perfectly.


End file.
